Fontaine (2017: 9):
Within SFL, very little work has been done on what constitutes a word and it is often the case, as it is generally in linguistics, that the orthographic word is the default but this is problematic for a variety of reasons. The most important reason is because English orthography has not been consistent (into but out of, corkscrew but tea towel, etc.). Indeed, the very nature of what is a word cannot be taken for granted (see Wray 2014). The focus on the orthographic word is a real danger to studies of lexis and as corpus linguistics increases in popularity, it becomes even more important to challenge the assumptions surrounding the identification of lexical items. The status of the lexeme and indeed lexical representation within the theory is critically important, not just for the theory itself but for the areas it ventures into including applications and dialogue with other theories of language.
Blogger Comments:
[1] This is misleading, because it is untrue. Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 568-9) are quite explicit:
The folk notion of the "word" is really a conflation of two different abstractions, one lexical and one grammatical.
(i) Vocabulary (lexis): the word as lexical item, or "lexeme". This is construed as an isolate, a 'thing' that can be counted and sorted in (alphabetical) order. People "look for" words, they "put thoughts into" them, "put them into" or "take them out of another's mouth", and nowadays they keep collections of words on their shelves or in their computers in the form of dictionaries. Specialist knowledge is thought of as a matter of terminology. The taxonomic organisation of vocabulary is less exposed: it is made explicit in Roget's Thesaurus, but is only implicit in a standard dictionary. Lexical taxonomy was the first area of language to be systematically studied by anthropologists, when they began to explore cultural knowledge as it is embodied in folk taxonomies of plants, animals, diseases and the like.
(ii) Grammar: the word as one of the ranks in the grammatical system. This is, not surprisingly, where Western linguistic theory as we know it today began in classical times, with the study of words varying in form according to their case, number, aspect, person etc.. Word-based systems such as these do provide a way in to studying grammatical semantics: but the meanings they construe are always more complex than the categories that appear as formal variants, and grammarians have had to become aware of covert patterns.
[2] To be clear, SFL Theory models linguistic phenomena 'from above'; that is, lexicogrammatical phenomena, such as words, are modelled in terms of the meaning they express. This is the direct opposite of viewing the word 'from below'; that is, in terms of how it is expressed (orthographically).
[3] As previously demonstrated, unknown to Fontaine, the status of the lexeme in SFL Theory is clearly defined, and the notion of lexical representation in a mental lexicon is inconsistent with both SFL Theory and, according to Edelman (1989: 228), 'the known facts of human biology and brain science'.
[4] To be clear, dialogue with other theories of language is dialogue with theories with different assumptions about language and how it is to be modelled.